University of Kentucky, Louisville flag hundreds of words from athletes' tweets

12:30 PM,
Aug. 21, 2012

Illustration (The Courier-Journal)

Written by

Mark Boxley
| The Courier-Journal

Student-athletes at the University of Kentucky and most at the University of Louisville surrender their online privacy to their coaches under a social media monitoring system used by both schools and others across the country.

As a condition of participating in sports, the schools require athletes to agree to monitoring software being placed on their social-media accounts. The software emails alerts to coaches whenever athletes use a word that could embarrass the student, the university or tarnish their images on services such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.